Hillary
by HillaryIsBae
Summary: I just started college, and there's a new sorority on campus I want to join. Especially after I meet their president, Hillary.
The first time I saw Hillary was in our anthropology class in college. Mr. Sanders was our teacher – we all hated him! He was so old and grouchy. But gosh, when I met Hillary I knew we had something in common. She was the president of Kappa Delta Beta, one of the sororities on campus, and I wanted to rush right away.

I like her for being such a nerd! She's such an A-student. She knows everything about everything (or so it often seems), and I will never stop being delighted that she's totally the kind of irrepressible nerd who knows the difference between a yurt and a ger.

I like her laugh. It is a big, loud, cascading laugh. I have a laugh like that, too. A friend of mine once told me it's the kind of laugh that, when he overhears it at a restaurant, it makes him wish he was sitting at that table. I know what he means. When I hear Hillary's laugh, I don't hear a "cackle," or any of the other ways it has been disparagingly described. I hear a laugh that makes me want to be sitting at her table.

I like her expressive face. I once wrote in my notebook: "I always find the charge that she is inauthentic to be completely hilarious, because Hillary has about the farthest thing from a poker face as exists in a sorority." I like her for wearing her emotions all over her expressive face, whether she's conveying disdain at frat bros with a transparently partisan agenda, or undiluted joy at meeting a child on campus.

I like her for dancing and singing and being silly, even when she knows darn well that it will be mocked and ridiculed by people who seize on any chance to demean her. I like pictures of her partying and having a drink. She looks like some damn fun.

I like women who are some damn fun.

One of the most over-done frames in college is the old "the sorority sister with whom you'd most like to have a beer" chestnut. It's never Hillary who tops the list. Georgina from Delta Chi? Sure. (Never mind that she was a teetotaler.) Dolly from Kappa Kappa Kappa? Of course! She seems like fun. But Hillary? Hard pass.

I would certainly accept an invitation to have a beer with Hillary (and I trust she wouldn't mind if I imbibed a tipple of Scotch instead). But the fact that I want to have a drink with Hillary, because I find her so eminently likeable in spite of the narratives that she isn't, is rather less interesting to me than this: I'm fairly certain that Hillary is the first sorority sister in my lifetime who might enjoy having a drink with me.

Whether I like the sorority for whom I rush has never been particularly relevant to me. It's always been more important that I trust them. I have, however, liked a few of the sisters for whom I've rushed.

But I've never thought for a moment that any of them would like me back.

Which is neither an unduly self-effacing commentary on my own likability—I have plenty of friends who like and love me a whole lot—nor is it a unilateral negative commentary on other sororities. I daresay President Michelle of Tri Delt, who has a fondness for pick-up games, might like hanging out with me more if I weren't 5'3 with the athleticism of a tortoise.

It's simply an observation about the fact that there has never been a sorority president who has experienced life in many of the same ways I have—as a bookish white girl, raised in a Chicago suburb in a conservative religious family, who grew beyond the boundaries of what life was supposed to look like. Who became a feminist. Who doesn't want to be the only woman succeeding, but one of many. Who will maybe never dance in public with abandon, but will still dance all the same. Who has no poker face.

Who just likes people so much, and wants to listen to their stories.

There are people who don't feel this way about Hillary, but feel it very strongly about Michelle. She would like them, she would get them, in a way no other modern sorority president ever could.

And there are people who have yet to meet (so to speak) a sorority president about whom they could feel the same. There are some parts of ourselves, innate or nurtured, so central to who we are that only another person who shares them can possibly be someone who makes us feel that thing, that "I'd have a drink with that person" thing.

That "whoa, this is a sorority sister who might actually enjoy having a drink with me" thing. A thing I never even knew it was possible to feel until there was a presidential candidate about whom I felt it.

I like Hillary. A whole lot. And it frankly feels kind of magical to imagine there could be a sorority sister who could like me right back.

Heck yeah I'd have a drink with her. And I think she'd have a drink with me, too.

If it ever happens, you'll find our pong table by the sound of our laughter.


End file.
